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Chapter 10 - Someone Should Probably Clean That Out

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The guy and the lady shared looks. Again. They didn't trust me. Really, how could that happen? Having a penchant for being a bit menacing, I didn't blame them.

"Look," I said. "Either I go out there and steal some coins off some saps to make my call, or you help me."

"That isn't the problem. You'll have your phone call," Mitsuo said.

"Good." Not that I cared about robbing some people who just happened to be in the wrong place and wrong time, who were quite plausibly just figments of my imagination. But things were less complicated the less attention I drew to myself.

"We're under a time limit," Reika? said, "so we need to hurry inside."

The blonde guy just nodded. "We have a secure phone that you can use."

They both led the way at a brisk yet casual pace.

We walked inside, Mia shivering in the underground parking lot. "It's so cold here," she complained, shivering. I hadn't even noticed there was a temperature change.

"You're in the underground, below Hypnos HQ right now, kid," Mitsuo said. "We don't get visitors. This way, to the elevators."

"I'm going to go back to manage operations." The woman left the four of us to take an entirely different route. Presumably to that one over the top room with the dome screens and the mechanical chair thing.

Mia walked up to me and reached out her arms. I picked her up and held her close. Was I really that much warmer? Sure, being underground and all, but I was part digital… Eh. Whatever, dream logic. Regardless, if the area we were in was cold enough to get her shivering, then they were packing some serious cooling, it being in the middle of summer, after all.

I carried Mia and Meicoomon as we walked toward the elevators. Mitsuo pressed the button to call one down, and we stood there in one of the few moments of silence I'd gotten since the entire mess had started.

"Is that actually comfortable?" I asked. Holding both Mia and Meicoomon like this, I looked like a bonafide crazy person. She shifted, eventually deciding to hang her arms over mine like a sagging plush.

Well, being covered with glowing smiley faces, the too-detailed realization of a ninth-grader's edge-sona meant there wasn't a whole lot that I could do to mitigate the "this is an insane creature that's as much about to murder me as to tell a bad, edgy joke."

Mia really was still exhausted, and Meicoomon was demonstrably not trustworthy enough to be let out of arm's reach.

We entered the elevator, and surprisingly, Mitsuo followed us into the tight space. For some reason, I'd figured he'd have taken another elevator, or disappeared and reappeared when we reached the top.

Say what you will about his critical thinking, a coward he was notS So there we stood, in the corner with this Mitsuo character, the dynamic duo hanging off my arms like plushies.

A minute later, the elevator dinged, we were off and led into a nondescript hallway and eventually into a fairly japanese lunchroom. The only surprise were cots sequestered into a corner, with folded blankets and a single pillow on each.

They had done some long nights. And perhaps had even done one while I went through the storm of their barriers. Otherwise, the place seemed like a pretty typical government building overall, complete with ominously humming fluorescent lights.

I let Meicoomon and Mia down, and both beelined it for the array of very small-portioned prepackaged meals and stacked microwavable bowls of ramen.

"This is our break room," he said. "Please wwait in here for Nullrenamon and I to return."

Mia gave me a glance, and I would have given her a thumbs-up, but I only had three digits. She smiled as I fumbled about for the right motion. "I'll be back as soon as the call is over." They were barely paying attention to me anyway, Mia trying to make sense of the Japanese lettering and images on the various packs of food.

"It's not super private," I said as he opened a door and held it open for me. "You can call me Kaylee, by the way."

He just nodded. It was hard to read his face, behind the sunglasses. He'd be a good looking guy to be honest, if he'd lost about fifteen pounds.

If digimon really did exist in my world, and this was my world. I'd have to figure something out. I wasn't going to let this body go. It was way too fun.

It was another nondescript room with a table, whiteboard and some chairs. "Wait here," he said. "I'll get the phone."

Sitting down in a chair after he left was a very… strange experience. I forgot I had a tail. I sat down in a regular office chair. A human office chair, with a back on it and everything. And now a particular point on the tail was giving me very sharp signals. It was like I had rammed my funny bone into a metal railing. Except the feeling was traveling all the way up my spine.

God, I was going to have to evaluate the entire relationship between myself and the objects in the world around me. It was like puberty all over again. If you ever forget your boobs are there, it will come to bite you in the ass. Things can whack them in moments when you're not thinking.

You have to walk through doors a certain way, you can't just slide along walls without rubbing, and sometimes—I'll stop myself there.

You get the idea.

Even when you're at school, you have to change how you stand and act with them. Not just because you're worried or trying to titillate, but because they actually really do get in the way in so many minor ways that you really wouldn't think about.

If you forget for too long and get too casual, well, all the guys with flushed faces or inability to stop staring will pressure you into changing your behavior even without your mom looking at you judgingly because you wore a tank top to school.

Sometimes, in a moment of forgetting that they're there, things can clip them, and it can be quite painful! Being part digital creature as part of the nature of the dream— I had to assume— came with suave yes, but when I sat down on the chair, I was greeted with a sharp pain where my tailbone was. The tail had hit the bit of metal and the ringing went all the way up my spine.

Slowly, I stood back up and massaged my tail a bit, before sitting back down, being careful to sit down in a particular way to avoid making that mistake again.

I sat there, in yet another nondescript part of the building.

There was no window.

How long was he going to take?

God, I was a half? 80%? Digimon sitting in a room looking like she was eager for the next business meeting.

"Yes, hello, I would like to suggest that we cut features out of our existing products that are still on the update cycle so that we can encourage customers to move to our subscription model.

This will allow us to have more stable revenue as our smarthome products by requiring phoning into the cloud. This will balance our operational costs and directly increase long-term revenue while ensuring we stay ahead of the competition and maintain our niche."

All while you have to occasionally smile and nod at a particular executive that you're pretty sure is getting Testosterone replacement therapy and makes casual comments about how terrible of a driver his wife is.

It was the bang from my fist crunching into the table that alerted me to Mitsuo standing in the doorway, bag in hand.

"Yeah yeah I know," I said, waving him in, holding out my hand for the phone. "This is why the digital and real world can't coexist blah blah blah" I said, using the other hand and a finger to make circles in the air.

La.

Dee.

Da.

He didn't respond to my bullshit except by tossing a bag of chips and a bottle of water on the table, sliding them to me.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

"It's a satellite phone." he said, pulling out a veritable brick of a phone, handing it to me. "I already have it set to dial out."

I picked up the brick of a phone. I was pretty sure even satellite phones in 2019 weren't the size of a house brick, but you never know. Something something government using old equipment.

The shit I do because I'm a wife and mom.

Hmm, let's see…

I took a claw and delicately typed in the number, 1-726-... Hubby's cell phone.

"This area code does not exist."

… huh.

That's okay. I'll just try my phone.

1-737-...

"This area code does not exist."

Every phone number I had memorized… uhhhhh… shit.

Well, that was wonderful. Maybe I was typing the phone number wrong?

"It's one first for the US, right?"

"Yes."

1-737-"This area code does not exist."

1-726-"This area code does not exist."

"Hah." I said, handing him the phone back. "What year is it?"

"Two thousand and three."

Oh. Oh right.

Wonderful.

That would make sense why the phone was so big. It would also explain why no one had phones or cameras out.

I could still salvage it.

I just needed to check that I even existed still. I'd be about, oh, ten?

Right?

Mitsuo pulled a chair back and sat down, staring at me.

"Time is strange in the Digital World," he declared. "It's more of a suggestion, to our understanding, than a law of reality. What year did you think it was? Technology has changed a lot in the last two years, let alone ten."

"Makes sense," I responded. "I think someone unplugged my freezer. Haha."

My arm trembled. I pulled it back when I noticed the little goops of grey ooze trying to make their way out.

No, we're still good. We can salvage this!

"I'm really, really not trying to be menacing," I say. "It's just, one thing leads to another and—"

"What do you know about the D-Reaper?" He said, serious. He stared me in the eyes.

Oof, it was a tiny little bit of ooze.

"Better question," I said. "What do you need to know?"

"Some time in the last three years, a set of kids with digimon went missing."

He paused.

"We received an email here or there about what they were doing. Looking for a digimon called culumon. They'd gone missing. Three years in the real world is a very long time in the digital world."

I let go of my arm. The trembling had ceased.

"Let me guess, they managed to get a message off before disappearing forever or something like that?"

Even half paying attention it was pretty easy to guess where he was going!

"Yesh The last note we have from them was the discovery of the D-Reaper. We'd kept an open correspondence with a few digimon on the 'other side', even after we locked our gate. No one knows what happened to them."

"Well, I had nothing to do with their disappearance," I said. "You could say Ruki even now, holds a special place in my heart."

The twitching in my arm had fully stopped. His face tilted, looking down at my digivice again. The anger on his face was palpable.

Shit, not like that.

"Did you meet her? That's not what the kids' devices looked like. Mia, the girl following you around has one, hers looks a bit more … recent."

I relaxed. Leaned back in my seat. My tail didn't like that. Not about to lose all composure, I grinned through the spine-shattering annoyance and subtly sat up a bit straighter.

"God, Nullrenamon, that's a great proposal! We will ensure that we suck our customers dry and remove as much cash from circulation through the use of recurring revenue streams as possible."

Pulled my right arm back to hold my left on my lap.

"No, I never met any of the kids you're talking about."

BusinessNullrenamon. yeah that would be my final evolution. Murdering everyone through the power of feudal rent-seeking and my hypothetical Harvard School of Business MBA.

"Pity," he said.

I grabbed the bottle of water, and twisted off the cap. He watched as my mouth and fangs materialized from nothing.

The water was nice, but Mitsuo had his questions. Which was good! We could clean up the mess, with time. I just needed a distraction.

"How did you bypass the encryption? That was supposed to be quantum and time-locked regions."

"Oh? That's simple, I had the password—"

"Bullshit!" he pounded the table, making the bag of chips shake.

"You're not even supposed to be able to enter the code until you reach the center. No digimon has managed to break through it since it went live."

'Yes I have a blade that's bound to my soul who's entire schtick is magically opening and closing any lock in existence,' I chose not to say.

"All right, all right!" I raised my arms in mock surrender. "The truth is that I can't actually describe it, because I don't know how it worked."

"Then describe what you did."

Guy was catching up to my bullshit fast.

"Hm, let's see… Have you been able to look at a visual of the encryption from the point of view of the digital world?"

"No," he said, "but I am aware of the digital world as a kind of world that exists alongside ours. For digimon like the cat, or you, it's as real as this world, he said, gesturing toward the hole I'd punched into the table.

"Fair enough. That encryption scheme on the other side is in the shape of a multilayered storm."

It would have been better if I'd illustrated it but no, I was NOT going to do that.

"Each level, if you will, got progressively darker. I navigated through each one. Then, I used an ability that I have, in order to detach the… pipe you had locked down and take control of it"

He was frowning but it wasn't anger, at least.

"I assume that once I left the pipe, you had immediately locked it down again?"

He nodded.

"Good. There's probably a number of powerful digimon that are looking to breach the barrier between worlds."

"In pursuit of you?" He asked.

"In pursuit of Mia, and her partner digimon." Probably in pursuit of me, if I assumed that the god who summoned me and created me wasn't the only one with those levels of power. No, stop Kaylee, you're okay, just breathe.

"Why did Mia ask you about doing Evil?" This was turning into a straight up interrogation. Thank God.

"Evil in a sense, yes. Mostly, she needed a safe place to escape her pursuers. Her and her digimon really are quite strong, but they'd been run ragged, and as kids are…"

"Will you object if I have one of the operators try to talk to her alone?"

Fuck. Well.

There was no way in hell I was going to let a grown-ass man sit in a room with an eight year old girl alone and ask her questions. A setup with an adult woman, or where I could make sure he didn't do anything stupid?

I wouldn't mind as much.

"Tonight? Yes, I would object. Tomorrow morning? Go for it. She needs rest and at least a few hours between PTSD-causing trauma—" he winced.

Unfair? No. Harsh? Yes.

"I … didn't know that there would be a human with a digimon with you when you crossed."

"No, but you did see me, with a clearly human girl, getting her food, when you decided to launch your program."

"I'll do what I can to make amends to her, but I stand by my decision. I have no way of knowing the mind of each digimon as they cross the border into my city."

Understandable, and I told him as much. In his shoes, would I have made a different call? Probably not. Especially when his city and world would occasionally deal with random digimon appearing, like some kind of ghosts. "Let's circle back. You care about the D-Reaper, yeah?"

He nodded.

The D-Reaper was a runaway program that eventually morphed into an eldritch god, that required breaking causality to defeat.

"Have you seen Culumon?"

"Not since we last saw the kids." A twist of pain hit his face. Great. This was going to dig up some survivor's guilt.

I weighed my options.

He couldn't keep me from Mia and Meicoomon. Not unless he figured out the trick to rip Meicoomon and I apart in one swoop. Which, being right at the Hypnos HQ, he wouldn't have brought us here if there weren't contingencies.

Well, I didn't really care if I died again at this point. A tinge of doubt crossed my mind though— what if the program did something irreversible to shred my data or soul? What if what if what if, all filtered through my thoughts.

I held my arm. I was fine.

Everything was fine.

Copacetic, even.

I still had Kyle's school phone number memorized. I could call and act like I was a concerned parent trying to see if he made it safely to school.

Things were going to be just fine.

I gripped the arm tighter. Thanks, Studio Ghibli, for inspiring this particular character detail!

Haha.

I just needed to find a way back home.

Simple.

The guy was probably lying about the year anyway. He looked older than he did in the show.

Fuck, that wasn't even the kind of lie I could believe.

"And?" he asked, starting to stand back up, drawing my attention again. "We can talk more, later. Mia isn't the only one that's low on sleep, you know."

I agreed, but...

"Before we leave and call it a day. About the D-Reaper."

"the reason you don't really need to worry about the D-Reaper program is that I've already taken care of it."

"Uh… huh," he said, waving his hand back dismissively as he turned to exit the room. "You're the only one that we know of who can break the encryption barrier. There's a digimon right now that has tried to break through, who can't."

Alone again, I sat back down in the chair for a second and rubbed my eyes.

This dream was really starting to suck.

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